On September 18th, there has been an incident where a puma escaped from its zoo cage. The puma was found in the zoo shortly after it ran away. However, it ended up getting shot because the anesthetic did not work. Hence, some controversies were ongoing after the puma was shot and killed.

The incident happened because the zookeeper has not locked the door properly after a cleanup of puma’s cage. The escaped puma was an eight year-old female, weighing around 60kg. As soon as they found out that there was a missing puma, citizens living nearby got an emergency notification message on their phone to avoid outside activity. At first, the search team found the missing puma inside a big paper box in the zoo. However, the anesthetic gun did not work on her and once again, she disappeared. The search team and management team of the zoo decided to shoot the puma instead of trying to capture her alive. About four and a half hours later, the puma was shot and killed. This noted an end to the whole puma on the loose incident. However, caused another whole event of uprising public debates.

Some people spoke up opinions that the government should ban or close down all zoos in Korea. Others said they should enforce the security system of zoos and pointed out that this whole event happened because of the zookeeper’s irresponsibility causing the death of the puma. Zoos are not simply places where the animals are captured from the wild and displayed for people to see. Of course, in the beginning, zoos were built to play a role for human entertainment and displays. However, zoos today have the greatest meaning of preservation and restoration of species. Zoos are now built to exhibit endangered or rare animals and to increase their population by preserving the animals.

Therefore, abolishing zoos will not help virtually. Animals released into the wild will starve to death because they cannot adapt to nature. In addition, we should consider that all zoo keepers will lose their jobs. In this case, the zookeeper who made a mistake of not securely locking the cage door, is getting too much criticism. Even if he was intentional or not, people no longer care about the feelings of the zookeeper, but care more about the death of an animal.

People could insist on the closure of the zoo, because of their thoughts of how a zoo looks nowadays. For some people zoos may seem like a facility that locks up animals for the entertainment of people. However, not all zoos are alike. Citizens should not forget that there are zoos for several crucial reasons such as educating young children and conservation of different species to stop further extinction. Rather than criticizing of managing zoos and insisting on the removal of zoos, we should look back on the meaning of modern zoos and support them.